SOURCE: Frame, Jeffrey D. “‘Now will I to the chink, / To Spy …’: Scopophilia as Gender Sport in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” The Upstart Crow 19 (1999): 50-61.

[In the following essay, Frame focuses on the voyeurism of the male and female characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream and suggests that the motif emphasizes the characters' maneuvers for power over one another.]

No other period in history seems to have given more attention to the socio-cultural concepts of “looking” and “listening” than the modern-postmodernist twentieth century, and for obvious reasons. From Freud and Lacan to Hitchcock and Foucault, one can observe an evolving and now flourishing preoccupation in books and journals with the “gender gaze,” voyeurism, spectatorship, and an informed “optometric psychology” all largely propelled by the scopophilic nature of a cinematic, media-saturated society. When it is applied to literary studies, the natural ramification of this infatuation with the camera obscura is a hypersensitivity to the presence and power of the gaze in classic texts as well as in texts from this century. Since Shakespeare's plays are no exception, they can hardly be exempt from general discussion concerning the countless recurrences of eavesdropping and clandestine confidant-forging found in great storytelling, particularly in Renaissance comedy. Spying serves a diversity of functions in Shakespeare's comedies—information acquisition, demonstrative evidence, cautionary supervision—functions that ultimately become means by which the “watcher” can wield power over the “watched.”

The terms “voyeurism” and “spectatorship” imply two versions of our preoccupation with the pleasurable gazing exercise known as scopophilia: the first involves watching as an unseen observer; however, the second represents a gaze in the presence of and perhaps even shared by others. Perhaps the most salient arguments for both voyeurism and spectatorship as legitimate focal points in the study of gender competition in Shakespeare are those suggested by character behavior in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Numerous acts of gazing are committed by the characters of Shakespeare's other plays: for instance, the paternally protective peeping of Prospero in The Tempest; the perception-bending, metadramatic devices of the Induction in The Taming of the Shrew and of the Epilogue in As You Like It; or Troilus's most unpleasant revelation of Cressida's unfaithfulness while he is camouflaged just outside the Greek enemy camp. However, in addition to serving as an instrument of plot in many other plays of Shakespeare, these scopophilic activities play yet another vital role unique to A Midsummer Night's Dream—one of unequivocally thematic significance. By identifying scopophilic symptoms and behavior in A Midsummer Night's Dream, one may examine how voyeurism and spectatorship—both predominantly masculine control tactics in the story—rival other generic “power play” behavior demonstrated by Shakespeare's characters and how they both are thereby manipulated subtly throughout the text, either consciously or instinctively, to shape not only the generic identity, submission, and expectations of other characters, but the very meaning of the text itself.

Parenthetically, some readers will properly see a connection between this study of scopophilia in A Midsummer Night's Dream and certain Oedipal, psychoanalytic, and homoerotic aspects of other Shakespeare plays. Many discussions concerning these aspects are well-known and profuse. Such theories are avoided in this brief discussion, however, for three reasons: ultimately, the theories are only indirectly relevant to the broader definition of scopophilia, especially when read in the somber light of Freud's “psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes”¹; furthermore, whereas voyeurism may have once “applied only to men with a serious disturbance,”² today the term is no longer gender-specific, nor is it relegated any more to the singular observation of sexual activity; and finally, despite the highly recognized homoerotic cultural tensions imposed upon English Renaissance actors, men and boys alike, contemporary arguments dealing with those tensions tend to overinflate them, often at the expense of numerous other critical issues lying at the heart of authorial intent and cultural context.

To address properly then the distinctly scopophilia-related questions in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the reader may benefit from a brief review of character and event as each unfolds within the multiple plots of the play. In the midst of Oberon's and Titania's clash of interests over the changeling boy and their battle for dominion in the forest's fairy world, humans likewise clamor for identity and domination on a parallel plane of reality. Having defeated her in physical battle, Duke Theseus of Athens must now conquer his formidable, Amazon war-prize Hippolyta in the socio-political arena while juggling untimely, sensitive domestic disputes at the same time. Those points of conflict, ignited by Egeus' customary patriarchal stubbornness, include Lysander's and Hermia's passion for one another, Demetrius' declaration of love for Hermia, and Helena's unrequited devotion to Demetrius. In the meantime, Bottom and the other “mechanicals” attempt to find meaning and audience in their creation of Quince's rendition of Pyramus and Thisby. Considering the broad range of character and event in the play, which characters show symptoms that can be considered scopophilic, and why? How do their actions as either voyeurs or spectators (or as both) in the play empower them, elevating their status and control over other characters? If one character's identity depends upon the identity of another, how does voyeurism serve this need in the play? Is the watcher necessarily always in a position of power and the watched always in a position of weakness, or vice versa—in part, because of the watcher's voicelessness? Regina Schwartz, raising similar questions in her investigation of voyeurism in Milton's Paradise Lost, decides that “Such questions push psychoanalysis, willingly or not, into the realm of politics, where insights into the complexities of the gaze could enable objects of sight to begin to reclaim their gaze—or, at least, their subjectivity.”³ An abbreviated exploration of the traditional character groupings in A Midsummer Night's Dream—fairies, lovers, nobles, rustics—and their interactive scopophilic enterprises provides a source of diverse responses to these questions and their political implications suggested by Schwartz.

The most conspicuous scopophiles in A Midsummer Night's Dream are the fairies, notably Puck and Oberon. Through invisibility, they become (as do most of the supernatural creatures in Shakespeare's plays) the consummate voyeurs. No sooner has Puck, as early as his second line in the play, warned a fairy in Titania's train to “Take heed the Queen come not within his [Oberon's] sight” than Shakespeare has already begun to alert his audience to Oberon's primary modus operandi for maintaining sovereignty over the fairy kingdom: looking and listening.⁴ In act one, scene two after his initial confrontation with Titania, Oberon launches his plan of retaliation against his queen by instructing Puck to fetch the magic flower, “love-in-idleness” (II. i. 168). In so doing, Oberon eloquently discloses how he first witnessed the location of the rare herb: “Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell” (II. i. 165). Revealing himself then as a creature uncommonly reliant on his sight as a source of knowledge and exclusive advantage, Oberon delivers one of his most illuminating speeches, conveying in it the power unleashed in the act of “beholding”:

                                        Having once this juice,
I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes;
The next thing she waking looks upon
(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape),
She shall pursue it with the soul of love.
And ere I take this charm from off her sight
(As I can take it with another herb),
I'll make her render up her page to me.
But who comes here? I am invisible,
And I will overhear their conference.

(II. i. 176-87)

Two types of voyeuristic power plays are set into motion in this soliloquy. First, Oberon is empowered by watching Titania as she sleeps. The act of watching someone sleep becomes, in fact, a recurrent motif and a celebrated signifier of the play's title as Puck scans the sleeping lovers on two separate occasions; Helena discovers the sleeping Lysander; Lysander spies the dreaming Hermia; Oberon peers at Demetrius resting; Theseus and his court inspect the sleeping lovers during the hunt in act four; and Oberon gazes a second time, now with Puck, upon the charmed Titania along with her Bottom while he dozes. Secondly, Oberon becomes transparent so that he may spy on the unsuspecting mortals. In both types of scopophilic activity, the watcher remains unseen, thereby taking on the role of the voyeur with all of its accompanying potency and pleasure. The terms “scopophile” and “voyeur” are therefore appropriate for Oberon and Puck, although the arousing, vicarious substitutions for sex inherently suggested by these terms in human quarters do not necessarily apply so neatly to Shakespeare's complex and unearthly fairy world.

As the small cabal of fairies advances, another symbolic anomaly emerges through Oberon's herbal prescription for passion. A drug ingested via the eyes rather than through the nose, mouth, ears, or touch is significant in its locus of effectiveness but is clearly not an arbitrary authorial choice. Oberon, creature of sight, ironically manipulates the sight of his female counterpart in such a way as to render her powerless to change her own perception and, consequently, reduces Titania to bestial worship. To accomplish this task, he applies the “juice” directly to her eyes. Puck uses the same application mistakenly on Lysander's eyelids, an error countered by Oberon when he applies the flower to Demetrius' eyes and when, at last, he threatens to administer the remedy upon Lysander's eyes late in act three. By reiterating the eyes as the central symbol in this business of mild hypnosis (and there are well over eighty references to eyes, sight, and vision throughout the play), Shakespeare ensures the audience's understanding that these perceptual shifts among characters show not only how the play comes about, but also what the play is about. Without resorting to pluralism or neoprimitivism, he reminds one of the inherent value in seeing the world from different angles—a vast variety of vantage points through which perception and interpretation remain in flux.

The only three characters to receive the juice of the flower in their eyes are Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius. Interestingly, the effect achieved depends largely upon gender. The joint response of the men to the charm is to ogle Helena throughout act three. While Helena is clearly the object of their subjective affection, Titania's enchantment causes the fairy queen not only to marvel at Bottom's appearance, but also compels her to forego her former fairy authority in order to convert from subject to object in the unaffected eyes of Bottom. Though she confesses to Bottom, “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape” (III. i. 139), she instructs her attending fairies just a few lines later to “Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes” (III. i. 165) and “To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes” (III. i. 173). The effect of the flower then is eventually masculine for it cultivates scopophilia in the men but makes a scopophilic victim of Titania against her will. Her only relief under Oberon's spell is her faint awareness of that spell: “The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye; / And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (III. i. 198-200). Thus, the heavens are recognized by Titania, as they so often were by the Ancient Greeks, as the omnipotent voyeurs peeping into each person's very soul, helpless in its exposure to the gazing of the gods. Oberon's act of voyeurism and “ocular inoculation” against Titania causes her to react in such a way that woman remains object and man remains subject—a kind of exploitative crime that many feminists might still label the “rape” of Titania.⁵

Oberon and Puck spend most of their time onstage in act three in the guise of “voyeurs extraordinaire” while the lovers' confusion accelerates. As a result of Oberon's prominent position in the play's action, his voyeuristic involvement and his treatment of looking as sport at the expense of others contribute considerably to the masculine scopophilia in the play, despite the prescribed “other-worldliness” of his fairy status. Puck, who is widely accepted as androgynous in the fairy scheme, finds quite a different use for “his” voyeuristic penchant. Though the major development in Puck's character emerges through his struggle toward self-identity, watching others within shifting contexts enables him to succeed. Puck's regular duties require him to monitor mortals and fairies for Oberon while Oberon monitors him. Because Puck is precariously suspended between being the observer and the observed, his sense of identity goes unfulfilled around Oberon. Oberon's pet-like affection for Puck does not allow Puck to ascend the fairy chain of command or even to find satisfaction in his immortality. Voyeurism is true sport to Puck only when he watches the rustics prepare their play since any observer of such coarse nonsense and disorganization is plainly in a seat of superiority over Quince and his misguided troupe. At these times Puck exercises a freedom and a power to move beyond simply eavesdropping at Oberon's whimsical behest: the fairy has his own fun not only through participating, but also possibly creating intentional mischief as he proposes, whispering to himself, “I'll be an auditor, / An actor too perhaps, if I see cause” (III. i. 79-80). Although Puck's sense of unfulfillment, even in the play's closing apologia, may be partially attributed to his generic indeterminacy, it is conceivable that his voyeuristic struggle for identity in the hierarchy of mortals and immortals is the principal cause.

Like Puck, Helena observes others as the means by which to establish her own identity. However, her observations are voyeuristic only once—when she, unseen by the slumbering Lysander, chances upon him lying in the woods. At all other times, her scopophilic behavior is purely that of a spectator—rather than voyeuristic—as she, in full view of the other lovers, returns Lysander's and Demetrius' gazes with her own look of incredulity. As the only lover who does not fall asleep early in act three, Helena repeatedly demonstrates her confusion and—like Puck, but more overtly—her dilemma in determining self-identity among the lovers with their shifting loyalties. Helena's apparent mantra, expressed in her soliloquy of act one, “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind” (I. i. 234), is the relational compass that guides her search for self-identity in later scenes. Her earliest remarks in act three, “I see you all are bent / To set against me for your merriment” (III. ii. 145-46), with her, “Now I perceive, they have conjoin'd all three / To fashion this false sport, in spite of me” (III. ii. 193-94), reflect her inability to equate what she sees with what she knows was true earlier in her relationships with the three other young Athenians.

For the remainder of the mid-section of act three, Helena becomes chiefly spectator. Along with voyeurs Oberon and Puck she attempts to discern what is reality and her precise role in it. Eventually, the “audience Helena” must watch the chaos among Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius play itself out before she believes she can define herself through their final attitudes toward her and one another. The end of the third act never affords her that opportunity, unfortunately, since all four of the lovers are scattered and lulled back to sleep by Puck. Nevertheless, a critical feature of act three is its careful depiction of the watched—those in a somewhat greater position of power and influence than the voiceless watchers who usually must resort to silence or defensive postures to retain their status. Among all of the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who are detected watching others, it is ironically Puck and Helena, two non-male characters, who engage in scopophilic conduct for the express purpose of seeking self-identity, despite the fact that a great deal of their watching places them in weaker, voiceless situations.

One of the most subtle developments of scopophilia in the course of A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's treatment of spectatorship among the nobles in three separate, but related occasions in the story. The first occurs in act one in the umistakably patriarchal court of Theseus. Certainly, at first glance, the pivotal figures in the scene seem to be men, as Egeus (and with lesser voices, Demetrius and Lysander) makes petition to Theseus. Even when Hermia builds her argument leading Theseus to devise a third alternative in response to her predicament, Theseus remains the key agent of action and control in the scene. Upon closer examination, however, one senses a peculiar female presence exerting a poised, coercive, almost imperceptible, “spectatorly” force throughout the first scene in the person of Hippolyta. After her opening tease with Theseus—her only line in the scene—she watches the rest of the scene silently, becoming audience for us, and by so doing influences and assists the actual theatrical audience in forming clear impressions and judgments concerning the initial conflicts.⁶ Perhaps this is the only example in the entire play of a female's appropriating what has been heretofore the masculine act of spectating as she proceeds silently to use scopophilic power to usurp the patriarchal order and to raise her status above that of Theseus. This inference is most plausible when one remembers that Hippolyta is the virile Queen of the Amazons and already brings with her a lusty unconventionality to Athenian femininity. Theseus' awkward words as he prepares to withdraw reflect his moderate recognition of Hippolyta's daunting, stalwart posture: “Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love?” (I. i. 122).

The next time we see Hippolyta is in act four, by which time she has begun to show signs of acclimation to Athenian society and decorum but not necessarily a compromise of her own charm and Amazonian convention. Even so, it is again Theseus and Egeus who manipulate scopophilic command on behalf of the court as they hover above the four sleeping lovers, speculating on the cause of their presence in the woods. As in the majority of instances of people watching other people sleeping throughout the play, the watchers here again are in positions more advantageous than those of the watched.

Hippolyta's final appearance occurs in the wedding celebration of act five. Still discreetly clinging to her own sense of propriety, she submits even further to Athenian culture. However, Hippolyta challenges the traditionally passive spectator role of the feminine Athenian code when she adopts the masculine role of active spectator along with Theseus, Lysander and Demetrius during the performance of Pyramus and Thisby. As in act four, she at first verbally, brilliantly jousts with Theseus—a discourse on the imagination leading Theseus into some of the most well-known verses of the play, some of which depend specifically on scopophilic analogy:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.

(V. i. 12-17)

At least one significant implication in these words is that Shakespeare, along with many other writers, is a scopophile in several respects. Writers may be simply experiential students or spectators—mere recorders of life—but always with the inherent potential to become voyeurs. Like Olympian gods, they may then choose to gaze down upon their inky creatures, pushing and prodding them along with their pens. Authors are, without a doubt, surveyors of the characters who populate their texts until, one day, the watchers discover their watched creation staring back at them, as Pirandello might remind us.⁷

Theseus' and Hippolyta's conversation is followed by his call for entertainment, in answer to which Philostrate provides a list of options. Philostrate cautions Theseus against Quince's company by explaining, “It is not for you. I have heard it over, / And it is nothing, nothing in the world; / Unless you can find sport in their intents …” (V. i. 77-79). Perking at the word “sport” and becoming leery of Theseus' intoxicated mood, Hippolyta protests the notion that the mechanicals' earnest performance should be made sport of by Theseus and his guests at the expense of Quince and his men. Theseus thus amends his approach in pseudo-sincerety by promising her, “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake” (V. i. 90). The play then proceeds with Theseus spearheading the gibes from the onstage audience. In reality, only three Athenian spectators mock the play-within-the-play, and they are all men. They are each taking part in what here may be termed the predominantly masculine sport of active spectatorship. Their activity takes the form of abrasive and unflattering vocal interruptions so numerous that Quince and his players find it difficult to maintain concentration and continuity in their storytelling. Hippolyta, therefore, must intervene as best she can by adopting their sloppy sport and by vocalizing her own distaste for the behavior of the audience “rowdies.” By taking on this role, Hippolyta's gaze becomes reflexive and interiorized as she, in essence, beholds in that moment two kinds of “performances” transpiring, in one of which she can view herself regretfully taking part.⁸

The culmination of the interiorized gaze in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the scopophilic mise-en-abyme represented in Pyramus and Thisby. Shakespeare not only finds a suitable microcosm for Elizabethan scopophilia in A Midsummer Night's Dream's immediate world of Athens, but he finds another crucial, microcosmic opportunity to depict the multiple reflexivity of scopophilia through metadramatic technique in the form of Quince's play within the larger play. At the core of this “house of mirrors” is the cranny or chink in Snout's Wall. This is the hole “right and sinister, / Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper” (V. i. 163-64). Shakespeare then equates this hole to the voyeur's camera with iconic deliberation:

Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!
[Wall holds up his fingers.]
Thanks, courteous wall; Jove shield thee well for this!
But what see I? No Thisby do I see.
O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss!
Curs'd be thy stones for thus deceiving me!

(V. i. 176-80)

In just one short, satiric declaration, Shakespeare captures both scopophilic theme and device in the form of parody. He further intensifies the joke by allowing Bottom's Pyramus to confuse the visual with the aural: “I see a voice! Now will I to the chink, / To spy and I can hear my Thisby's face” (V. i. 192-93). By painting a comic picture of voyeurism as unpredictable, obscure and dangerously presumptive, Shakespeare adds a final healthy dose of sugar to help his medicine go down, inviting his audience once again to laugh generously at its own perilous folly whenever it develops scopophilic symptoms. Here again one observes Shakespeare's inimitable literary gift of shaking his audience soundly with the voice of caution, but delicately doing so through the mouthpiece of self-parody. Perhaps Quince's Prologue makes one's own scopophilic indiscretions more palpable, forgiving in the process, when he concludes, “And through Wall's chink, poor souls, they are content / To whisper. At the which let no man wonder” (V. i. 133-34).

Voyeurism and spectatorship then, as two distinct, but related types of scopophilic “power plays” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, may not only benefit an intentionally manipulative watcher like Oberon, but also contravene the weakness of voicelessness symptomatic among involuntary observers. By remaining a voiceless observer, one can occasionally be empowered with a new, advantageous knowledge and a subversive control over the voiced and the observed, as is true for Hippolyta. A mobile scopophilia further enables the watcher to negotiate a self-identity based contextually on the identity of the watched in A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly in the cases of Helena and Puck. Shakespeare's clever keystone in the larger dramatic design, of course, is his reflexive grand finale in the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus and Thisby during which Theseus, Hippolyta, and the other nobles of Athens make their own theatre and define the visual field for the second tier of spectators: the actual theatre audience seated in the house. In his book, The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur's Gaze,⁹ Norman K. Denzin's involved discussion of multiple gazes and reflexivity in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window would seem to hint that Shakespeare's final act in A Midsummer Night's Dream is a similar, self-referential invitation to the theatre audience to assume the role of voyeur and to draw their own interiorized meaning from that intricate adoption process.

The investment of trust in one's eyes and the images they record has permeated modern and postmodern attempts to define our conscious, socio-cultural self-worth as a civilization. In the “Epilogue” of his Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's narrator concludes that “… all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd”¹⁰—a hole not unlike Oberon's telescopic eye, Helena's self-conscious tunnel vision, or Bottom's empty chink—each one, perhaps, a kind of deformed aperture of Shakespeare's “human camera.”¹¹ Following suit, Kobo Abe's The Box Man suggests that “The reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and the inexactitude of human eyes.”¹² Yet this popular, seemingly modern enigma that questions what it means to see and what it means to be seen—a socio-cultural paradox which can largely be attributed to Dostoevsky's seminal “underground man”—had already been meticulously, insightfully, and certainly no less artfully investigated hundreds of years earlier within the Elizabethan framework by Shakespeare when he challenged both scopophilic form and content by intertwining them into A Midsummer Night's Dream.

For this particular text in the Shakespearean canon, scopophilia moves beyond a localized, social phenomenon or mere plot-character device to become a more expansive, thematic motif—a paradigm for the politics of perception and interpretation in every culture and time period¹³—which may account partially for the play's heightened levels of accessibility to and popularity with modern audiences, most of whom have been seduced gradually by the visual culture in which they live to view the world through a camera's eye. Perhaps it is only contemporary American audiences who are predisposed to read the symptoms of scopophilia in A Midsummer Night's Dream—a predilection encouraged by the patriarchic reading formation imposed upon them by the ultra-visual, gazing, American culture of the twentieth century. However, the perceived presence of scopophilic symptoms and behavior in A Midsummer Night's Dream may represent more than just an immediate postmodernist or strictly American sensitivity by implying a larger, perennial phenomenon in history, one that would support Shakespeare's own recognition of the gender gaze as it existed in Elizabethan culture.

Notes

1. A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 2.

2. Joy Davidson, “The Secret Voyeur in All of Us,” Cosmopolitan, 221 (1996), p. 180.

3. Regina Schwartz, “Through the Optic Glass: Voyeurism and Paradise Lost,” Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), p. 147.

4. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 256-83, from II. i. 19; all subsequent quotations from the play will be cited parenthetically in the text.

5. For an excellent discussion of the various roles both men and women have played in the evolution of feminist and gender studies over the past few decades, see Naomi Schor's “Feminist and Gender Studies,” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gilbaldi, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 262-87.

6. I am indebted to John Hirsch's production commentary on Hippolyta's world and his interpretation of her intentions in the Applause Shakespeare Library edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream edited by John Russell Brown (New York: Applause, 1996). His insightful contribution figured prominently into my own rehearsal work with the actors playing Theseus and Hippolyta when I recently produced and directed Dream at Trevecca Nazarene University.

7. In Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, the mysterious “six characters” suddenly materialize on stage as fictional creations who have become self-actualized, interrupting a rehearsal by a company of “real actors” in the process. By awakening their theatrical selves, they are led to question their own identities and to seek out the elusive, yet ubiquitous author who wrote them into existence.

8. My suggestion here concerning Hippolyta's unique perspective on the events that unfold in act five owes much to the notion of interiorized, reflexive gazing as it has been thoroughly treated by Norman K. Denzin in The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur's Gaze (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995).

9. Denzin's book is an invaluable resource containing comprehensive coverage of pertinent classical and contemporary social theory concerning scopophilia and its multiple forms, from Foucault to Mulvey. For another superb summary of contemporary social theory as it relates to the “cinematic gaze,” see also Denzin's Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (1991).

10. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random-Vintage International, 1995), p. 579.

11. Although one typically attributes the advent of photography to the many nineteenth century developments in film and camera technology, the concept of the camera obscura was already well underway in Shakespeare's lifetime. Most current sources on the subject posit that Leonardo da Vinci's exploration with landscape painting and perspective in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries led to further experimentation with the notions of camera obscura and camera lucida, including the invention of the first true camera lens by Daniello Barbaro published in La Pratica della Prospectiva in 1568 (see Tony Patti's article in “Historically Speaking” of the May 1994 issue of PSA Journal [vol. 60, no. 5, p. 11]). During the next century or so, uses for the camera obscura continued to evolve rapidly in the work of Giambattista della Porta, Johannes Kepler, and Johann Heinrich Schulze, among others. Some sources, looking prior to the fifteenth century, even suggest Aristotle's keen awareness of the principle of a camera obscura evidenced in some of his earliest writings, to be followed shortly by Chinese experiments with the idea in the first century AD. Thus, the likelihood of Shakespeare's own awareness of the camera obscura along with his recurrent hinting at the notion in A Midsummer Night's Dream of the human (and fairy) as a living camera—a private “chamber” from which to view unseen a projected image of the world—not only makes the specific scopophilic connections to each character's “hole of invisibility” seem plausible, but deliberate as well.

12. Kobo Abe, The Box Man, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996), p. 86.

13. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), p. 158.